Baking & Export

Baking

Baking saves the cave as ordinary assets: a prefab plus one mesh asset. The baked prefab has no Cave Builder components and works in any build. The editable cave stays in your scene, so you can change it and bake again.

• Output Folder / Prefab Name – where the prefab (Name.prefab) and its meshes (Name_Meshes.asset) go
• Mesh Quality – Final is recommended
• Colliders – static mesh colliders on every floor and wall. Leave this on unless you add your own collision; without it the player falls through.
• LOD1 – a lighter version for distance. Openings keep full detail, so neighbours never crack.
• Lightmap UVs – needed for baked lighting
• Mark Static – static flags for batching, occlusion culling and lightmapping
• Include Decorations / Include Lights / Include Path – optional extras

Buttons:

• Bake Cave – first bake
• Update Existing Bake – overwrites the earlier bake of this cave in place. Every copy of the prefab in your scenes updates.
• Create Copy – bakes to a new name and keeps the old one
• Select Prefab / Show Output Folder

The tool never overwrites a prefab that belongs to another cave. Baking is blocked while there are errors.

Export and Tools

All on the Finish tab under Export & Tools.

Terrain

• Cut Terrain Opening – cuts holes into a Unity Terrain wherever the terrain surface lies inside the cave, so the entrance opens into the landscape. Needs the cave colliders (on by default).
• Restore Terrain – fills the holes under this cave again.

Both can be undone. The entrance’s Selected tab has the same button.

Path (waypoints)

Export Path creates a Cave Path object next to the cave: the walking-floor centre-lines of all passages as waypoints, with room hubs connecting each room centre to its openings.

• Point Spacing (m) – distance between waypoints
• Height Above Floor (m) – 0 for the floor, about 1.6 for a camera rail
• Room Hubs – adds the room connections

Use it for AI patrol routes, camera rails, spawn points or guides. Programmers can ask it for a point at a distance (GetPoint), the closest point to a position (FindNearest) and the paths meeting at a junction (SegmentsAt). Exporting again updates the same object.

Minimap

Export Minimap writes a top-down PNG of the cave floors (as a Sprite) and a data asset that converts world positions to positions on the image. Pixels per Metre sets the resolution; Elevation Colours shades lower floors blue and higher floors warm.

Layouts

• Save Layout – saves the cave design as a JSON file
• Load Layout – replaces this cave’s design with a saved one (can be undone)
• Load Layout as New Cave – creates a new cave from a file

Use layouts to back up a design before big experiments, or to move caves between projects with the same Cave Builder assets.

Statistics

Counts passages, length, rooms, points, meshes, triangles, colliders, lights, decorations and mesh memory, plus the triangle count the shell would have at each quality.